Network of Coney - Magazine 01

A magazine on activism and inter/action This is the first magazine released for the network of Coney. The aim of the network is to be an open space where people can meet, play, and exchange ideas. Coney hosts an irregular sequence of open events to function as this kind of space. If you’re reading this and not already in the network, then you can join immediately at www.youhavefoundconey.net/thenetwork. You’ll find out about these events and receive future magazines directly once in the network.

This magazine is a collection on what it means to act.

Coney makes work in which the audience is present and can play, where action and interaction are important. But there is also a focus here towards a question of activism.

Some of this magazine arises from open events this year, some from the programme of work we’re making, some were invited from artists in the network.

A Show + Tell Salon is an open event where speakers make a show and tell style presentation of an open-ended question, before the audience talk in small groups and then conversation opened out to the room. At CPT, Coney hosted a Salon on Activism as part of the Sprint festival in March. In June, we hosted a Salon on Systems as part of Two Degrees. Some of those presentations are here, and three - by Hannah Nicklin, Richard Paton, and myself - are also published in the Network blog (blog.youhavefoundconey. net/tags/network) with their question attached as a starting-point for online conversation. Have a look and say what you think.

A Playful Documentary Unit is an open event workshop for artists to investigate a particular neighbourhood and then make short pieces in response to that locality. A Playful Documentary Unit on Camden and West Euston was hosted at CPT again as part of Sprint, and then another hosted at GIFT (Gateshead International Festival

of Theatre) on... you guessed it... Gateshead. Both of these culminated with a pub quiz of locally-sourced questions about the local area. Some of these questions pop up in the magazine, and there’s a puzzle to be unlocked online if you can answer them all correctly.

In Camden we discovered the former location of the Euston Arch, which once stood as an extraordinary gateway into London, and now lies as rubble at the bottom of the Lea canal. Its description by the British Almanac as being “noble but not strictly necessary” inspired the illustrator Ella Britton to make an alphabet of unnecessary things of Euston.

Ella has also drawn an extraordinary illustrated map of Lower Marsh, a street in Waterloo, where Coney made an exhibition this summer as part of Fantasy High Street. The exhibition, made in collaboration with an underground local agency, was of The Loveliness Of Lower Marsh, documenting small acts of loveliness made by and for people of the community of the street.

And finally, we’re about to unveil a new piece of immersive playing theatre called FuturePlay inside FutureFest, produced by Nesta. FuturePlay invites you into a future potential activism based on play, and gives a toolkit to survive in an increasingly playable world. We’re lucky to be collaborating here with three companies >CC, Glitchspring and Playify, any of which we strongly recommend you engage with online. We’ve also been connected to the mysterious Frankie Kuniklo, who is delivering a short keynote. Will Drew, collaborating on FuturePlay, writes about how he first encountered Frankie, and there’s an interview with Roger Krolik of Glitchspring.

Thanks for reading.

Tassos Stevens, Co-director of Coney @agencyofconey

1

When did somebody last What will you fight for? change your mind?

An extract

by Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin

An extract

by Matt Adams @blasttheory

I set out to find common voice: common experience, a common city, a community. But what I found - the overwhelming thing I found when I asked people for stories was the answer “oh, I haven’t got anything interesting to say.”

Was Occupy perhaps the first political movement that refused to answer the question of what it was about?

Maybe that, in itself, opens a door to a different form of political activism.

In York I asked a man with a zimmer frame - tell me about a journey - and he replied ‘oh, I’ve nothing to tell you.’ I reframed the question a couple of times and then he said ‘well, I have sailed around the world single handedly.’

A life is always political, bringing up children is terribly political, so we’re all aware we make political decisions all the time throughout our lives. Even when we’re making artwork or experiencing artwork. So then the question to myself was, so what are the possibilities where the public can act, but are not activists?

No joke.

He told me ‘you can’t fight the ocean, you’d never win, you have to work with it.’

In Shipley when I asked one woman ‘tell me about a time you were the best of yourself’ she burst into tears at the idea that she might ever be worth enough to have an answer to that question.

Capitalism has stolen our stories.

It sells them back to us, like bottled water.

They are never about us.

They never listen.

Audiences want to believe.

Audiences want to be told what to do.

Audiences want to play along.

They turn away from ‘what is’ and carefully pass ‘what if’ between them.

The philosopher Philippa Foot came up with something called the Trolley Dilemma. Prior to that more-or-less moral philosophy was philosophers arguing for incredibly detailed papers on particular sets of behaviour. Foot came up with a relatively simple formulation, this question.

Hypothetically, a trolley is running out of control down a track, in the path of about five people. You can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different path to safety, saving those five people. Unfortunately there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip that switch?

And so it’s a simple moral question, would you kill someone to save five lives. But it’s the way it’s put into context that makes you wrestle with it. And to me, that felt like a very interesting way to think about interactive theatre, in that suddenly you are invited to think about why you would act in a certain way in a certain circumstance, doing that with as much complexity as you can.

•

I think the beginning of asking audiences to act is to make something they aren’t afraid to break.

You’re not afraid to break things when you know they can be fixed. How they’re put together.

Something that doesn’t say ‘believe’ but ‘look’, that doesn’t tell, but asks. Not ‘play along’ but ‘construct’ that in turning await from ‘what is’ turns us towards one another, within ‘what if’.

The work I told you about - my part in it - was constructing a mirror. Unimportant. The important part, I’ve discovered is the asking questions - in listening - but crucially in a way that tells people that they will be listened to. The work is the device that says ‘I heard you’.

From a Show + Tell Salon on Activism and What Makes People Act.

This does bring me back to the question I wanted to frame for today, which is what will you fight for? Where would you put the stake in the ground? We are all activists every single day. We’re all constantly negotiating those decisions and of course that’s not to suggest there’s an equivalence between a person who spends several months in a camp in front of St Paul’s and the decisions that we make. But I think it’s important that we all think that activism is something that we are doing, not that other people do, and that occasionally we might join in with.

And that sort of question like how you’d handle a racist remark by a cab driver or someone behaving aggressively on the bus. To me, those are very meaningful places where I have to decide how I frame my political action, and that they have just as much continuity in my life as the moments where I’m on marches or directly debating political questions.

2

What stops change?

by Jennie McShannon @jenniemcshannon Systems Thinking Consultant We face a time of unprecedented complexity and systems are becoming denser and evermore multi-layered. Faced with increasingly complex problems we seek solace in certainty. We build narratives which reflect our perspective, our preconceptions and in certainty we find validity.

But when we get stuck in mental traps we can’t change the things we know aren’t working and we can’t change the system because in fact we continue to reinforce it.

So how do we start to think about the system? First we have to notice that the system exists and to see that taking the system apart and understanding all the different parts of this system is not sufficient. A load of sprockets and springs are just things but put together carefully you get …a chainsaw. You can only understand how the chainsaw works by seeing how all the parts work together.

Core to systems thinking is a focus on the relationships between the different parts of the system. it’s a holistic perspective.

Related to this is the other key factor in thinking about what might be needed to be able to effect change. Making an active choice to step outside our way of thinking and see the bigger picture: to look at it from another perspective …or …another’s perspective Think of a time when you have suddenly seen how to resolve an argument or problem. What made the difference? It is usually generated by stepping back. This is escaping from a mental trap and put simply, systems thinking is an organised way to gain a bigger picture and step out of our mental traps.

What does it take to think in this different way? What might it mean to us?

Well try crossing your arms as if I’m boring the arse off you.

One arm naturally falling on top of the other. How does it feel? Comfortable normal?

Now uncross and fold them the other way with the other arm on top. How does that feel? Uncomfortable, awkward?

Folding our arms in a non-habitual manner is a similar level of discomfort – yet often the times we grow and expand our thinking and our behaviour the most is when we are outside of our comfort zone.

So that makes me think that often when we know we need to do something differently we can’t make the change. And what stops us making the change is the discomfort we will experience. Having to give up being right, acknowledge that our perspective is only one of many valid perspectives and even be willing to be wrong!! God forbid! Paying attention to how we interrelate rather than who we are individually and therefore see things in a less linear way.

But most of all be open to uncertainty.

Can you see politicians being willing to sit with uncertainty?

It’s hard to tolerate uncertainty so when something big goes down we fall back into our known ways of thinking.

We try to look like we are in control and we know what we are doing. And we find it hard to sit with uncertainty and look at things differently….so nothing ever changes….

From a Show + Tell Salon on Systems

Molly Barrett reports...I had a very interesting conversation with two men from the council. They were on Jackson Street, inspecting the joins between the new benches, bike stands and lamp posts around the new Tesco Extra. They were wearing high viz, hard hats and they had clipboards. I asked them how many labourers were working on site building Tesco. One of them said:

We approached local people, saying we were researching a pub quiz on Gateshead and asked them, as experts in the area, to set a question. At Gateshead Interchange, I met one of these workers in high-visibility wear. He worked the oil boats for 25 years before taking his indentures and ending up working as security for Nexus, which looks after the transport infrastructure in Gateshead.

“I don’t know at present, but at the peak there were about ....”

How many?

His question is the same question he’s often asked by tourists getting off the Metro: what’s the best thing to do here in Gateshead? Which is his answer?

B) 60 C) 120 D) 650 E) 2,350

B) Go to the Baltic and up the 5th floor for the views.

C) Go shopping at the Metro or the new big Tesco Extra D) Go to the Sage for a cup of coffee.

E) Get back on the Metro and go to Newcastle.

3

Protest as performance, inspiring or dull?

An extract

by Richard Paton, activist Here we have a quote from columnist Caitlin Moran.

She said, “The Protester, I find to be a beautiful thing. An objection made flesh, a whole body made over to do one thing: voice disapproval, simply by standing somewhere.”

• In 1996, there was the biggest, most audacious street party organised by Reclaim the Streets in the UK. This was on a road, I think it might since have been redesignated, it was called the M41, but it was actually a very short stretch of motorway in West London. We took over about 5 or 10,000 people who took over the whole motorway. I was involved. We used big metal tripods, we blocked the slip road onto the motorway. This cleared the traffic.

These were big, massive pantomime dames, which moved through the party. There were sound systems, streamers and banners on a nice sunny day, took over the whole road, cleared it of traffic and made a big communal celebration, a carnival.

The pantomime dames had a ladder going up to a platform in the middle where the performer stood, “wearing” big hoops covered in skirt material around them. But here is the twist, because actually what happened, was that they hired a pneumatic drill. So somebody’s under the skirts of one of these dames drilling up the road. So they took out these bits of tarmac, in order to plant a tree. A symbolic gesture.

But here’s a 2001 Guardian article by Charlotte Raven. She writes: “I’ve never been one for street parties as a form of political protest. They’re too much fun for the participants, who approach the day with the misconceived notion that they are its primary focus.”

Previously, she writes: “The frustrated performance artists who latched on to political protests for their own egotistical ends were rightly consigned to the margins. Jugglers and fire-eaters knew their place… The unicycle brigade are now in charge of everything - from thinking up funny ha-ha acronyms for their activist cells, to mobilising fellow protesters to star in street theatre events.

‘It’s the ordinary people - those whose contempt for the system is neither a source of creative inspiration nor an excuse for wearing silly outfits - who are now on the periphery.”

I actually took the trouble to write to the author at the time, upbraiding her for her uncomprehending views.

Now, I think she had a point…

Here’s a quote from Walter Benjamin – the German-Jewish aesthetic theorist – in 1929: “Poetic politics? We have tried that beverage. Anything, rather than that!”

4

Protest as performance, inspiring or dull?

Continued...

I like the jadedness of the quote. That is, these concerns have been around for a while – the coupling of art and activism, just as have people getting bored of it.

And we come to CIRCA, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army - speaking of “funny ha-ha acronyms”. Now some of these were involved with the Reclaim the Streets when they founded this, and they really got going at around 2005 at the G8 Summit in Scotland.

So when I first lay eyes on the Clowns, they were all doing their thing in sync and they were doing it on the Meadows in Edinburgh, which is quite a big park. It was not exactly a protest situation, but it certainly was a conflict situation.

They were marching through the park, I thought it was kind of cool actually. They were all doing it in unison. The next time I saw them was on the front line, where there’s kind of a bit of a battle, with police trying to keep people off the road, other people trying to get on the road. They were there, with feather dusters, prancing about! Then I was really just filled with ambivalence, I was like, “Whose benefit are you doing that for?”. It’s all a bit weird.

I read something about the Tahrir protest in Cairo, which was that they’ve got this nexus of the people who are protesting are predominantly young, many of whom are university educated, and they don’t really have a social base. They can’t call on the support and involvement of most of the people in the industrial regions in the Nile delta, for example. Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood can, because they’re involved on a day to day basis fulfilling social needs. They’re involved in the lives of those who don’t have much money, who are a large part of Egypt.

And in the case of those in Tahrir, they don’t have that sort of social involvement at all. They’re all kind of Twitter literate, people who are good at the internet, and relatively young, but they’re not most Egyptians. And for us I think, we’ve got the same issue.

This is a quote from Thomas Frank, a political analyst, prompted by Occupy Wall Street.

“What kind of movement might actually succeed? A movement whose core values arise not from the need for protesters to find their own voice but rather from the everyday lives of working people.”

And then, the final nail in the coffin, he says, “And it should absolutely not be called into existence out of a desire to re-enact an activist’s fantasy about Paris ‘68.”

Well - everyone, especially involved in Reclaim the Streets were keen on the mythology of 1968.

So is protest self-absorbed, or can it be really good?

The thing is, this post-war tradition of protest – youthdominated, nonclass aligned – is by and large an expressive activity. And if that need for self-expression finds a tactic to harness itself to – and preferably works with some base of people beyond the protest mileu – it can be fantastic.

I mean the road protest I showed you was brilliant. Yeah, you can read the symbolism in the protesters’ actions, but also tactically they were doing something very practical at the same time – and supporting a whole community being displaced. But without that practical focus, there’s a risk these movements become too excited by themselves, and solipsistic.

From a Show + Tell Salon on Activism

So the question is: is a lot of what we’re doing basically cultural activity, which is pretending to be political activity?

Is the cultural side of activism oversubscribed?

Yes, it’s definitely oversubscribed! Likewise the intellectual side.

•

5

Whats gained and whats lost when people get to their feet in interactive theatre?

by Tassos Stevens @tassosstevens

Some of my notes from a last-minute presentation covering a speaker who was ill.

@amaenad I’ve only done a bit, but fresh from a dinner theatre gig last night, I can’t resist..

Here are some different models of theatre where you get to your feet: • the classic Punchdrunk, where you make your own journey through a mostly mechanised playscape, which is too full of cool stuff for any one person to discover. Cue story-swapping in the bar afterwards.

• a model like A Small Town Anywhere, where a roomful of playing audience change what happens through their play and choices, individual and collective.

• a model of adventure, where you might go on an immersive journey, usually out in the world, that might surprise you but the bones of the experience don’t change.

@amaenad The notional membrane (it was never a wall) that separates the two realities is charged - aesthetically, erotically etc. and its revelation as a construct is a loss of wonderment, illusion - some sheen of glamour.

All of these are exhilarating to experience at first. There’s an intoxication that comes I think because you’re on your feet, the action is embodied, and you’re taking what feel like risks continually with the ‘safety’ of the experience.

@amaenad With that come the attractions and anxieties of any intimacy, managed as they are by the form and the skills of performers. It brings to the forefront the quality of the nonverbal negotiations - extant in all live work between audience & performer. It takes away the audience’s safety too, which is why I think many can find it frightening. And it requires a more fluid relationship with disbelief - not so much suspended, as set aside and occasionally nodded to.

But that intoxication wears off, as we habituate to the conventions of these experiences, and you understand that there isn’t really much risk. And do we lose the space for reflection? We designed that into the tail of Small Town.

What do we get when we are sitting down? Let’s start with that as the baseline. You’re imagining a what-if presented in front of you, together with all the other people in the room. What if the world were really different? You’re collected together and paying attention together: the communal experience. You’re always wondering ‘what happens next’ because you’re a story-making brain in a story-making space. You’re finding a space for reflection, not just afterwards but in between. But you’re also imprisoned, you can’t move, you can’t do anything that makes a noise, there’s a tyranny of politeness. But then look at the Pit in the brilliant Globe Theatre, it’s a living pit of humanity interacting in many different ways, making it live.

And like many last-minute speakers, I shouted out on Twitter for input. Many brilliant people responded, but picking out here a sparkling thread of conversation between Aliki Chapple @amaenad and Clare Duffy @ clareduffy.

@amaenad One thing I think the audience gains is an ownership of the experience - disconcerting as a degree of freedom can be. Another gain is that it grounds the experience in bodies and breath and space - it is palpable, visceral - there is in theatre the experience of watching which isn’t that different from watching a screen; all light & image. This is flesh.

@amaenad It might be that interactivity replaces the way distance is charged with the ways intimacy is charged. The aesthetic pleasure of watching with that of playing/improvising, and a sense of competition with the performance. @amaenad the erotics of safe voyeurism with last nights old gents peering down the front of my dress. @clareduffy loved @amaenad response. I fink it’s fascinating how many people suspect *it’s all fixed* even when it isn’t and couldn’t be @amaenad Maybe they want it to be rigged? it’s reassuring to be unable to affect the outcome? @clareduffy yes very likely...& possibly a logic that says ‘Theatre’ = fake therefore it’s impossible for anything *real* there @amaenad Of course that : ) From a Show + Tell Salon on Activism

6

Illustration

by Ella Britton @ellabritton

7

The first I heard of Frankie Kuniklo

by Will Drew @venice_dolphin The first I heard of Frankie Kuniklo was towards the beginning of summer when I was in Venice. Finding I had a bit of time on my hands, I decided to take a trip to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana or St Mark’s Library. Now, I don’t know how much you know about that library but it’s a 16th Century building designed by Jacopo Sansovino.

It’s a huge collection of original classical, medieval and renaissance texts, mostly Italian. They also have a system though where every book published in the Italian language has to register a copy of that book with St Mark’s. I thought I might have a look at any books they had about play in the library. Has there been research on this kind of thing in Italy?

I asked the librarian who spoke excellent English. I mean uncannily good. Something about Venice makes you primed for the uncanny. She even seemed to have a slight Welsh accent. She gave me a conspiratorial nod and told me to follow her through a maze of bookshelves. We came to a section that seemed to be between anthropology and theatre. There she took out a small volume. It was called “The Future of Play: A Prophecy”, roughly translated, and it was by Frankie Kuniklo. It looked like it was self-published.

A plain black hardcover.

It begins as a piece of science fiction in which Kuniklo describes a network of individuals from all walks of life who combine their skills to make the world a slightly

Maria Crocker reports... Smokers Corner is where the grass meets the concrete behind The Sage. If you stand there you’ll be sucked into a secret passage with ancient walls covered in graffiti. It’s important you don’t stand there too long.

Yesterday, two women stood at smokers corners and enjoyed a cigarette. They talked about what they were going to wear for Kirsty’s birthday- it was last night. One of them had a new black dress from Topshop but the other is skint and needs to regurgitate something out of her wardrobe, again. They both work at The Sage, only part time. Smokers Corner is the only place they get to talk about clothes and men and things not appropriate to talk about at work. It’s got a beautiful view of the riverside but is quite secret from the public eye. It’s the perfect spot.

Which brand of cigarette were the women smoking here?

Q) Marlboro Light R) Camel Light S) Lambert and Butler T) Silk Cut

better place through play. He talks about the subversion implicit in the very act of public play and the potential of the collective in an individualised society. He discusses secrecy as both a liberating source and as something that at times courts suspicion. By taking action in the real world, the members of the network begin to feel more connected to the world around them as well as part of something bigger than themselves. They also discover the space to act, the space to take agency in late capitalist nations that feel like they rob of us almost entirely of our agency and cast as passive consumers instead. The gestures he describes are often relatively trivial, on the surface, but both the operational logistics behind them and the impact they have on individuals are so much greater than you first imagine.

The most exciting thing about this book though wasn’t the fictional description of this network, it was the revelation that this may not be a work of fiction after all.

The revelation that, at some level, this organisation may already exist. Frustratingly, it was just after I had arrived at this extraordinary revelation that a surly librarian (not the one from before) came to tell me that they were closing for the day. I asked if I could take the book home but, no, all the books had to remain on site but I was welcome to come back the next day…

The high-visibility worker reckoned that the British gangster film Get Carter had put Gateshead on the map. The car park had been a landmark of brutalist architecture until it was demolished. Ednie, who works at St Mary’s Centre says she’d have happily torn it down herself. The worker said that there had been plans to put a rooftop restaurant on the car park, but it never quite happened.

A question then from Verity Quinn and Sam Powell.

How much would a commemorative piece of the Get Carter Carpark cost you?

Is it: P) £5 Q) £6.50 R) £10 S) £50

8

You cant beat the system. All the questions.

An extract

by Dr Bill Savage @lowvisworkers

by Harry Giles @HarryGiles

You can’t beat the system, man. We’ll look at what that means. What is ‘the system’ and why can’t you beat it?

ALL THE QUESTIONS, IN ORDER, WHICH I ASK MYSELF WHEN I AM ASKED TO SIGN AN ONLINE PETITION VIA SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES

The system for old hippies was the government, the police, an unconquerable authority, a huge mountainous rockface that oppresses down on you with no foothold, no grasp, blow it up or be oppressed.

But a system is people. And change happens in and between people. Although the distance between some people is distant.

A system is people, and you always remember that. And remember what turns people on. They like a good story.

And they always like an underdog.

• When we old hippies think of the system, we imagine the industrial-military-complex. Like it’s a factory somewhere in the Arizona desert, next to Area 51. Or Mordor. But the system takes a body corporate and capitalist, and it’s all around us, pervading our everyday lives.

Take a corporation like ATOS. They are a French IT multinational, and now in your UK alone they are starting to run the computers of the UK Border Agency, the Work Capability Assessment on disability benefit, and even the card-payment systems for railway tickets in mainline stations.

Michel de Certeau wrote in The Practice Of Everyday Life about La Perruque. This being the gaps of time in which workers inside the system would be able to do their own thing, unnoticed by the corporation, whether whittling some wood while working on security, or playing Minesweeper while covering reception. A distributed practice of time towards our own ends.

Another?

Again?

Can I be bothered?

Can I read it all through?

Do I care enough about this cause?

Should I care more about this cause?

Will I ever care more about this cause?

What would it cost me?

Why not?

Does it matter where my name is signed?

Can I in good conscience sign a petition when I am against the political strategy of running petitions?

Can I in good conscience not sign a petition when my theory might be wrong and it costs me so little?

Do I really have the time to read it all through?

Will I remember to check it later if I bookmark it?

Is this cause as simple as it seems?

But is it?

Is it though?

Does it really cost me so little?

Will the emotional process of signing this thing give me more energy for genuine struggle or less?

Will anyone notice if I don’t sign it?

Will anyone notice if I don’t share it?

Is it worth it?

Is thinking it through at all worth it?

Shall I just cut the crap and sign it?

OK? Are you satisfied?

Should I tweet it now?

But what if in these micro-opportunities of time we took to find ways to change the system from the inside in small human ways? Not just workers, the corporate capitalist system needs us consumers too. And it’s a system under pressure. Would the most efficacious challenge on ATOS be a thousand people gathered in demonstration, or a thousand ways innovated by those people for all of us to make micro-challenges to its systems where we meet them in our everyday lives?

From a Show + Tell Salon on Systems

9

For you, Stranger

by Sayraphim Lothian @sayraphim In 2011 I dreamed up a public art project, an act of guerrilla kindness, in which I would make fake cupcakes and leave them around the city for people to find and take. It was the first work of this type I had made and I was struggling to find a title for it. I wanted it to be short, easily understandable and a direct invite to the finder to take the work home with them.

I was talking to my partner, who is a playwright, and we’d been debating titles, by which I mean I’d been suggesting long and complicated titles and he’d been pointing out that each one I proposed was indeed long and complicated.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I can’t just write something as short as ‘For you, stranger’ on it.”

He smiled and said “Actually, I quite like that.”

I thought it over – ‘For you, Stranger’ was short, simple and a clear invitation for whoever found it. I decided I’d add a ‘@Sayraphim’ but making the ‘@’ sign in the shape of a heart, to make it more like a card on a gift. This is so finders can contact me if they like (the ‘@’ clues them in that it’s how to find me on twitter), but this project isn’t about responses, it’s about making a beautiful moment for a passer-by, and hopefully making their day nicer.

10

An interview with Roger Krolik COO of Glitchspring Glitchspring are one of three companies collaborating with Coney in making Futureplay.

Glitchspring is hard to pin down. Like many tech start-ups, it doesn’t have an office but here that’s deliberate. “We want to be where the action is”, explains co-founder Roger Krolik, “and that means being fleet of foot.” I’m talking to Krolik in a cafe near Moorgate in London, his rather battered laptop simultaneously chatting via local wifi to colleagues in Berlin and New York. “We’re distributed not centralised, so there’s no point in a roof.” He points to commuters outside. “And we’re making tech to impact on people and systems serendipitously. I like to have an inspiring view”.

So what is Glitchspring? “We want to be a wellspring of glitches, moments when a system momentarily grinds and splutters, grit in the machine. But in these sometimes inexplicable moments, a space can open up for something more human. Like when you’re on the underground, and everyone’s in commutervision!” His hands make blinkers.

“But then the tube stops in a tunnel, the tannoy explains the train is being held for a little while. And then people look up, smile at each other, make random chitchat: a temporary sense of community as normal rules of engagement are suspended. So we’re designing tech that might glitch in impersonal mechanized systems and make them more people-friendly.”

Glitchspring’s launch product explains Krolik’s current proximity to the City of London. “BBit13 is a service for financial markets, especially high-frequency trading.

In these systems you’ve got bots trading at millions of transactions per second. They’re literally tunneling through mountains to shorten the distance between brokers and the exchange, because if you can shave even a millisecond

off the time required to send instructions to trader bots, you’ll make serious money.” He orders another macchiato, patter accelerating. “And it’s literally inhuman, beyond the limits of our perception never mind our ability to keep up.

There are flashcrashes where the market plummets in a few seconds and it takes years to work out what happened.

But markets are meant to serve people. How can more human values be present?”

Bbit13 is Glitchspring’s answer to that question. “It’s a black box algorithm, I couldn’t tell you exactly how it works even if I was allowed. But perhaps imagine a creature like a rabbit set free in the machines of the markets. Rabbits hop, give cables a little chew, entirely unpredictable mammalian intelligence. So Bbit13 acts as a random generator in a market system, making noise that confuses the speedbots, slows them down a bit. But we don’t just need random acts, we need values in them too. So we’re looking at research on serendipity, developing hybrid systems to teach our bot to act playfully and positively. That will be coming soon.”

Krolik’s mobile rings, and while he’s scrabbling in his bag for that, another two phones start ringing. “Gotta dash” he grins. But is something like BBit13 really possible?

“Well sometimes even I think I’m just talking up a storm, however compelling the story. But y’know, keep telling yourself something...” http://www.glitchspring.org contact@glitchspring.org

From a random sample of passers-by north of Euston Road over a weekend, which was the most common reason for them being here?

A) They are just passing through B) They live near here C) They work near here D) They shop near here

A man in his thirties, who is staying in the upstairs of a pub near Euston. They are looking after him because he’s a regular down on his luck. He used to be a freelance contractor working for Network Rail. His question: the Network Rail Head Office used to be in Euston. Where did it relocate last year?

C) Milton Keynes D) Newark E) Crewe F) Edinburgh

According to the man who sells delicious Indian vegetarian snacks behind the counter of Gupta on Drummond Street, which of his snacks is the most popular with British customers?

S) The chili bhaji T) The onion bhaji U) The spicy samosa V) The peas ball

Together with English, French, and Japanese, in which of these languages does the sign outside the BT Tower announce that there is no public access?

H) GermanI I) Russian J) Mandarin 11 K) Italian

Questions from A Playful Documentary Unit Dotted throughout the magazine are questions taken from previous Playful Documentary Unit actions.

Each question has got 4 answers, each listed with a different letter.

The letters of the correct answers in order spell out a ‘word’.

Put this word after “www.tinyurl.com/coney” to discover a hidden page.

For instance, if the letters of the correct answers spelt ALPHABET then you’d try www.tinyurl.com/coneyALPHABET

Credits & thanks A Show + Tell Salon on Activism, hosted in Sprint at CPT, curated by Tassos Stevens, hosted by Tom Frankland, speakers Hannah Nicklin, Richard Paton, A Mystery Speaker, Tassos Stevens, Matt Adams.

A Show + Tell Salon on Systems, hosted in Two Degrees at Arts Admin, curated by Tassos Stevens, hosted by Tom Frankland, speakers Andy Merritt , Jennie McShannon, Claire Buckley, Holly Gramazio, Dr Bill Savage with Michelle McMahon.

A Playful Documentary Unit on Camden & West Euston, hosted in Sprint at CPT, Coney here represented by Alyn Gwyndaf & Tassos Stevens, makers including Ian Williamson, Ella Britton, Tim Wright, Caroline Ford, Kate O’Connor, Alex Hopkins, Flora Wellesley Wesley, Patrick Ashe.

A Playful Documentary Unit on Gateshead, commissioned and hosted by GIFT. Coney here represented by Tassos Stevens.

The Loveliness Of Lower Marsh, commissioned by Fantasy High Street, made by Coney in collaboration with the Lower Marsh Agency. Coney here represented by Alyn Gwyndaf, Toby Peach, Rachael A Smith, Tassos Stevens, and others.

Futureplay, commissioned by NESTA for Futurefest, made by Coney in collaboration with >CC, Glitchspring and Playify. Coney here represented by Neil Bennun, Joost Bos, Chris Branch, Charlie Clarke, Will Drew, Brian Ferguson, John Gottschalk, Gareth Howells, Rose Pickles, Hannah Nicklin, Tassos Stevens and others.

Thanks to Brian Logan and all at CPT; Kate Craddock and all at GIFT; Mark Godfrey and all at Arts Admin; Lydia Fraser-Ward and all at Fantasy High Street; Pat Kane, Olly Arber, Simon Morrison and all at Nesta.

Thanks to everyone else who has participated, performed and assisted in these events, Harry Giles, Sayraphim Lothian, and all the other writers and makers here.

Coney HQ is Alex Rowse, Annette Mees, David Cahill Roots, Tassos Stevens, Tom Bowtell. @agencyofconey youhavefoundconey.net knock@youhavefoundconey.net

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